Time Stops will have its world premiere at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts on July 15-17, 2022. Tickets start at $45.
Bonnie Logan was always drawn to storytelling, visualizing characters, and the human condition but it wasn’t until after a serious accident in 2017, that she began writing for the stage. Logan was recovering from an injury, when a friend presented her with songs to tie together with a storyline.
Inspired by her tight-knit country club community, she wrote her first musical, Boca Bound. The show deals with themes of getting older, relationships between parents and their children, and love later in life.
As for her training, she says: “ life has given me a lot of formal training. I’ve had my eyes open and my ears always perked up.”
Assisted by her creative team, Logan learned what was expected on the stage through the process of making Boca Bound. She notes that while developing the characters, they are always with you when you are writing. She also believes it’s important to be the “person who looks for the best idea in the room.
For Logan, the process of creating a musical was an incredible experience.
”It shows you things about yourself that you never knew. It pushes you as hard as it can to be as good as you can because you have other people there that are doing the same thing,” she said.
She loved the musical writing process so much she sought to share it with the audience in her latest musical, Time Stops. However, she didn’t want it to be a documentary so she opted to create a show within a show. She would use the backdrop of a musical to showcase the beauty of the creative process and address issues through the main character storyline.
Time Stops has taken her to a place with her creative team that she never thought she would reach. Both musicals gave her an appreciation for the hard work each scene in a musical entails. Logan wrote 21 scenes for Time Stops and it features 26 original songs written by Brett Boles.
Time Stops tells the story of Emma Portman, a successful playwright who can no longer write due to the death of her daughter. Through circumstances and events in the show, she embarks on the journey of creating a musical about someone very similar to her daughter. Emma believes that everything will be better if she can change the outcome of her daughter’s life in the musical. However, she doesn’t inform her collaborators of her true intentions with the show and situations out of the ordinary begin to happen.
Being a parent, Logan understands a mother’s biggest worry is losing a child. She wanted to demonstrate the different ways people handle loss, process grief and the effect it has on relationships. Logan was researching about the topic when during the pandemic, she met a woman who told her about the loss of her daughter and Logan knew she had to write Time Stops.
Another situation she tackles in the show is confronting uncomfortable issues within a relationship and the reasons people decide to stay with each other or part ways.
Through the two acts of Time Stops, Logan shows various aspects about the musical writing process that audience members may not have known before.
“How people collaborate, issues during collaboration, selection of the cast and when everybody is on the same page it isn’t difficult but when one person has an agenda as Emma does to write about her daughter then things begin to happen that wouldn’t normally occur in the process,” she said.
She wrote Time Stops in two years and one of the greatest lessons she learned was effective character development. She believes when audiences care about characters they’re going to love what’s presented to them.
“We have to be rooting for the characters or getting upset with them but when you know the characters it’s so much more enjoyable. My greatest lesson was learning how to pull that character development thread through the scenes,” she said.
While Emma works on the musical in honor of her daughter, the trauma from her immense loss is quickly revealed. Soon, Emma finds her own world crumbling around her as the realms between fantasy and reality converge. Communicating where reality ends and fantasy starts on stage seems like a daunting task.
As the show progresses, the audience begins to see the various things that push her buttons or she can’t handle. It’s clear since her daughter’s passing, Emma has not been the same. When she makes the decision to write the musical, there’s a change in her behavior.
At first, the audience only notices her strength but as she gets closer to the fantasy that she’s developed you start to see the cracks in her armor, and see her changing. Through the dialogue and music, Logan and Boles communicate Emma’s personality change.
Logan describes the collaboration with music supervisor/producer Michael Moritz, director Chad Larabee, and composer/ musical director Brett Boles as “amazing and everything she had hoped it would be.”
She worked with Moritz on her previous show as well. He introduced Logan to music composer and lyricist Brett Boles. Boles received the script of Time Stops at 6pm and called three hours later confirming he wanted to work on the show. Logan recalls Boles wrote quick songs before he was on board based on the script and she was blown away.
The best example of their collaboration was when she wrote a scene for Emma leaving her husband’s restaurant deciding she wants to write again. He suggested she write Emma’s thoughts, feelings, and dialogue as if she were in her head.
“Two days later, he had written the most beautiful song, everything that I had wanted for her or thought about her he put to music. It’s just amazing. That’s what collaboration should be like,” she said.
Director of Time Stops, Chad Larabee has also been Logan’s mentor and is someone she trusts implicitly.
Logan believes everyone is going to relate to Time Stops, from ten year olds to seniors.
She wants the audience to walk out of the show feeling that there is a hopeful message for whatever it is they want to do in life, whatever change they want to make, that it’s possible for them.
“Think about the situation you are living in, whether it’s right for you. Always look inside yourself and make sure you’re not doing things for other people instead of doing them for yourself first,” she said.
The most challenging aspect of creating the show was the character development for Logan. She wanted her characters to speak authentically. As a playwright, she notes you have to be ok writing and rewriting.
Courtesy of Bonnie Logan.
Her advice for aspiring musical writers is to first decide what story you want to tell and the character best equipped to communicate that story.
“Think about what the beginning would be and what the end would be. You have to let your imagination go wild and put all of those thoughts down,” she said.
She suggests finding someone you trust who is knowledgeable about theater writing and getting ideas about how to frame the story for stage. Learning to write theater banter is key. She highlights the audience needs to learn something new each scene.
To learn to write that way, she advises taking a creative writing or playwriting class as well as listening to podcasts about writing musicals.
“My recommendation is absolutely if you want to do it, you find a way to do it. I will say that writing is one of the most rewarding experiences, what it does for you emotionally is incredible.” she said.